


when only one was shining

by metonomia



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: F/M, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 17:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonomia/pseuds/metonomia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She turned away, but with the autumn weather/ Compelled my imagination many days,/ Many days and many hours:/ Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers./ And I wonder how they should have been together! - - - The time spent on Ramandu's island, extended and expanded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when only one was shining

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been in the works for approximately three years, and that time frame has no bearing on length or anything - I simply could not finish it for the longest time, but I'm so excited to have it up now. A million thanks and so much adoration to Love and Rock Music for the original suggestion, and to Starbrow for an excellent and encouraging beta.

From “Lucy,” by William Wordsworth  
  
She dwelt among the untrodden ways      
  Beside the springs of Dove;      
A maid whom there were none to praise,      
  And very few to love.      
  
A violet by a mossy stone  
 Half-hidden from the eye!      
—Fair as a star, when only one      
 Is shining in the sky.      
  
She lived unknown, and few could know      
 When Lucy ceased to be;      
But she is in her grave, and, O!      
 The difference to me!      


* * *

  
    After the others have wandered off to while away the afternoon, Lucy finds herself dawdling at the table, watching Ramandu’s daughter.  The lady piles up plates and cups and trays, and balancing the lot, turns toward her hillside home.  
    “May I help?” Lucy asks.    
    “Oh!” The girl had not noticed that she is still there. “Thank you. Um.” She pauses, clearly more than able to do without help, and Lucy surprises herself with an awkwardness she hasn’t felt in years.  
    “Sorry,” she murmurs. “May I walk with you?”  The star’s daughter smiles.  
    “Please.”  It takes only a few moments to reach the door — it seemed much further away in the confusion and magic of dawn — and when the girl reappears, they wander back to the table pavilion.  They say nothing, and Lucy hopes the lady does not notice her frequent glances.  She cannot tell what is star and what is human, but her eyes linger on uncombed, curling hair and slender fingers leading up to strong shoulders, bare feet dainty but calloused, and in between a generous chest that makes her own ache with desire for her own once-adult body and for the other girl,  and Lucy feels herself blushing.  She could be exploring the island with Caspian and Edmund, but she is far more interested in exploring its lady.  
    She is shaken out of her embarrassed silence when the lady moves to adjust the stone knife from where some bird’s beak or claw has pushed it aside.  
    "How can you even bear to touch it?"  
    Ramandu’s daughter looks at her, surprised and surprisingly understanding. "It's no more evil than you or I; it was she who used it who made it so in your mind."  
    “Perhaps,” Lucy says, guest-polite, silencing fey shrieks and her brother’s Winter-pale face. “Still, I don't think I could ever — " She stutters silent as the star's daughter reaches out and places the handle of the knife, shockingly warm and and almost soft, into her hand, folding her fingers around it gently.  
    "You know the power of the Deep Magic, do you not, Queen Lucy?" Her back straightens against the weight of the weapon and the title.  
    "Of course I do." Pre-dawn darkness, cold rock, that very knife. She and Susan studied the runes on the Table for years; she is no Centaur-seer, no Jadis, no Aslan, but she knows her magic.  
    "This blade is an instrument of that magic, made from the same stone as your Narnian Table, a relic and a history of the most ancient times.  It has done no harm for hundreds of years."  
    “Perhaps,” Lucy says again, and ventures, “a personal history may be more powerful than any number of years.”  
    “Was any wrong ever done by it to you personally?” The girl asks, frowning in confusion; Lucy is relieved to find that the star’s daughter does not know everything about her. She looks away down to the water, where Edmund and Caspian are going over the ship with Drinian.  
    “It threatened my brother, and when I was eight years old for the first time, I watched the Witch use it to kill Aslan, and I slept that night with my cheek pressed into his blood, and I have held that with me through two worlds and lives, and I don’t think it will ever stop hurting me.”  
    “But Aslan returned,” the star’s daughter says, eyes narrowing as she works to figure out the girl before her, a girl who is more and less than the songs of her ancestors say.  
    “And I left Narnia, and returned. Twice. It doesn’t make the leaving any easier.”  She looks down at the knife in her hand and reverses her hold slowly, smoothly, pointing the blade more towards the ground.  That is not much better — she would not have even the earth threatened by it.  She drops the stone back onto the table and turns away.  Ramandu’s daughter is less imposing now, but her eyes and her hair and the still-sharp memory of her hands on Lucy’s are overwhelming to a woman made child again.  She was never Susan, but once, not so long ago, Lucy knew how what to do with these feelings.  
    “Enough of history,” she says, memory rising in her.  “I was hoping you would show me the island.”  
  
+  
  
    Lucy follows the girl down to the sand before the Dawn Treader, where she stops, staring past the ship as though trying to see the entirety of the world.  Perhaps she can; Lucy knows nothing of stars, for all that she has now met two, and she knows even less about their daughters.  
    They walk together on the beach —  it is such a small island, no more than a stray inkblot on Coriakin’s map, but the beach extends infinitely — barefoot and windblown, the ancient queen and the star’s daughter indistinguishable from one another.  They don’t say much, but Ramandu’s daughter reaches over to take Lucy’s hand, and in that moment Lucy thinks she might no longer need the end of the world.  
  
+  
  
    “What do you do?” Lucy asks on one of their many laps of the island.  
    “Sing the birds in each morning.  Lay out the table each evening.”  
    “But that is your duty.  What do you do in your free time?  What do you do for fun?”  
    “There’s not much else to do here,” the star’s daughter replies with a laugh that is not entirely happy.  “I swim, and take walks.  There is a flock of island birds that I care for, and I have my garden.  Our duty is everything, really. Aslan may create feasts out of nothing, but though this is his table, neither my father nor I are Aslan.  This island is blessed, the crops grow healthy and full year-round, and we have all day to work, and it is a simple matter to prepare a meal each night. It is a good charge, a good life."  
    Lucy tilts her head thoughtfully, wary of giving offense, but at the gateway to the edge of the world there is time for nothing but the truth.  
    “Do you ever wish for more?” She finally asks.  
    “Every day.”  
    Lucy looks west, and the star’s daughter squints with her into the setting sun, and she echoes softly into Lucy’s ear the Queen of the Stars’ ode to shadow-bathed Narnian woods.  
    “Narnia makes beautiful music,” she sighs when it is over.  
    “It does,” Lucy says, “even without the stars.”  Ramandu’s daughter laughs even as Lucy’s eyes widen in embarrassment.  
    “I only meant — “ she says.  
    “I understand,” the other girl giggles.  “And I would so like to hear Narnia’s own music.”  
    “I am not Narnia,” Lucy says, “Not anymore.  But I can share some of her songs.”  And she knows she has little claim left upon the country that was hers, but by the time she has sung for the star’s daughter, in her trembling, unmuscled child’s soprano, the lays of the naiads and the Dwarfs’ dirges and even the twittering canticles of the Birds, she feels at home.  
  
+  
  
    Lucy learns that the star’s daughter also eats the fireberries.  
    “Every second day,” she explains, “so I grow neither older nor younger ‘til I join the stars.”  
    “There and back again,” Lucy says.  “I know how that goes.  My own path was not so plotted, though.” Not so self-controlled. Never a choice.  
    “Do you want to try one?” The girl offers, and Lucy has lived enough days over that to lose one seems a relief.  The berry is shockingly bitter and leaves the taste of blood in her mouth, but she chews and swallows and smiles, and the star’s daughter leans forward to kiss her, catching the memory she exhales softly.  Her lips are not as soft as Lucy would have thought, not as gentle, and she is deliberate but clearly unpracticed, and Lucy thinks, _I am kissing a star_ , and she would have guessed -- she might have wondered, in her first life -- that kissing the star-born would burn, would have the same searing pain and sweetness of Aslan’s breath, but it is simpler, stranger, and she sighs again at the newness of it.    
    “You ate blackberries in cream with Mr. Tumnus and practiced archery with Susan, and in the evening you coaxed a Terebinthian duke into more equitable trade rates,” Ramandu’s daughter says, and Lucy sighs.  That duke went on to name a ship for her, and took her to visit the Porpoise pods near his home. She might have married him — she could have been happy enough with him if any man — but late summer storms kept him on his island, and she rode out hunting a White Stag.  
    “I would rather it have taken away Rabadash, or Tumnus in the Witch’s courtyard, or the,... the bombing.”  
    “You’ll keep all the memories no matter what,” the other girl tells her, brushing a thumb under Lucy’s eye, catching the tears Lucy hates to cry, “but I can give it back as best I can,” she offers, and Lucy smiles, a real smile, to meet the next kiss.  
  
+  
  
    “I still don’t know your name,” Lucy says later, lips swollen and warm and content, voice rising in the whisper of a question.  
    “I don’t have one,” the girl says, younger than Lucy has yet seen her.  
    “How?  Your father is named; the other star we met - Coriakin - has a name.”  
    “My father will not name me until he returns to the skies, when I will go with him and become a star, too.  He has only ever called me ‘daughter,’ and there have never been other people to confuse me with; when there are, they bring their own names.”  
    “I think that’s sad!  Everyone ought to have a name; it gives you yourself even when you’ve lost everything else,” Lucy says.  
    “I’ve never minded.  I think that if my mother were here I would be named, but she was not of the stars, and she died giving birth to me, and I have never needed a name. I have myself, in any case. I don’t call myself anything but me.”  
    “But do you want one?” Lucy asks, letting a handful of sand flow through her fingers and into the other girl’s palm.  
    “If I am named, it will be because I have become a star.”  
    “You don’t want that,” Lucy realizes.  Ramandu’s daughter smiles sadly at her.  
    “I have never been a star,” she says, “but I have been something of an earth-dweller, and yet have only seen such a little part of this world.  I don’t want to finally look out on it all if I cannot be a part of it.”  
  
+  
  
    "Lucy," Edmund begins, letting his eyes flick over to the star's daughter.  
    "I know," she says.  
    "Alright then."  
    Edmund worries about her even then, because he knows his sister, and he knows the dangers of loving Narnia, of loving anyone in Narnia.  Lucy loves fiercely, and this strange girl at the end of the world matches her infinitely.  No matter how many times Lucy tells him that she knows she’ll have to leave Ramandu’s daughter, Edmund watches her wrap herself more snugly into this girl and knows it is her way of leaving more of herself in Narnia, another piece of her life that she will be unable to forget but never again able to have.  
  
+  
  
    Ramandu’s daughter is not a queen, but she is a farmer, and a shepherdess, and a hostess. She looks at Lucy, Lucy with her knife always at her side, her bright wary eyes, her tales of war, and knows she could never defend a kingdom in battle. Her strength is in arms that can lift a lamb from the mud, hands that can separate roots from earth without damage to either, feet that know every inch of their island and where to step quickly, where to tread softly. She can collect eggs from a hen one day and snap its neck the next, can take a sheep she has raised from birth and bleed it out to roast for guests that never come. She is quite sure she could never kill but for this basic use. She is not sure she could even kill in defense.  All she knows of war is from her father's tales of the campaigns of men, and now Lucy's and Edmund's more specific and grisly stories. She prefers to hear them from Edmund, who is full of a practical detachment that is easier to listen to; the dead become a history rather than a picture. When Lucy speaks of her northern campaigns and hunts for fugitives, her sea battles, there is a vicious satisfaction in her eyes that unsettles Ramandu's daughter. Her Lucy is strong, yes, and wild and fierce, but always soft and gentle as well, fierce in laughter and wild in play; she is not this bloodthirsty Queen of war.  
  
+  
  
    Eustace asks all sorts of questions, and, moody in a way she associates with England and helplessness, Lucy is either painfully annoyed or just as curious.    
    “You all keep expecting us to just find an end of the world, but I still don’t see how that will work. What's beneath the world if it doesn't rotate?"he asks, and Lucy simply turns and walks away. _Why can’t he let England go? Eustace is such a_ child, she thinks, and she catches sight of her rippled reflection in the shallows and starts to cry.  
    "No one knows," Caspian replies when Edmund is the first to go after his sister.  "Unless you do, my lord?"  Ramandu shakes his head.  
    "Stars dance in the sky, and if that extends around the base of the world, I have never heard tell."  
    "But how does it stay?  What's holding it in place?  In my world, the law of gravitational force holds us all to earth, and earth in orbit around the sun, and so forth."  
    “Magic, Eustace,” Reepicheep teases, twitching his whiskers dramatically.  They all laugh.  
    “Perhaps we’ll find out,” Caspian says, and sees his own fearful desire in Reepicheep’s eyes, in the way Eustace’s body twists eastward.  He sees it in Lucy, too, who has returned but stands apart, holding hands with the star’s daughter, solemn and ancient as she meets his eyes.  
  
+  
  
    "Where does all the food come from?" Eustace asks later, and Lucy looks up at the other girl, smug in the fact that she already knows the answer.  
    "We make it," Ramandu's daughter replies.  
    "All of it? Every day? Do you have servants helping? Or . . . magic?" Eustace still stumbles over the idea, but no one laughs at him now.  They are all of them raw with the infinite newness of this place, the things they are learning about themselves each hour.  Caspian is still watching the girls.  He thought he understood Lucy, and he thinks he might still, but this is something new. He desperately wants a part in it; he misses the simplicity of the _Dawn Treader_ and cannot bear the thought of only watching from afar.  There is something fitting about the queen of legend and the daughter of a star, though, and that is what hurts.  He does not really have a place here unless they want him to, and he knows keenly how willingly he will wait on their word.  
    "Of course we make all of it.” She smiles at Eustace but looks at Lucy.  “We have nothing better to do.”  Caspian thinks about how much Narnia still needs people who can put things to rights, people who can make magical things happen, people who can bring simple nourishment to a land still starving for so much. He thinks about how Lucy did this once, one part of four strengths, and he thinks Ramandu’s daughter could do it in her own way, and he thinks he needs help.  
  
+  
  
    They are practically identical with their sun-painted skin and hair, and though the star’s daughter seems the elder of the two, the other girl understands Lucy’s own age.  Neither is willing to be caught up in such trivialities, and they are all the more joyful for it.  They run across the beach and through the island’s thin forests hand-in-hand, shoes unknown and hair leaping free behind them, skirts tucked up and shirts falling off freckled shoulders.  At night when the sun cannot kiss them, they are each the other’s sun.  
  
+  
  
    "I wish you could meet my sister," she tells Ramandu's daughter, tracing patterns on her back.  They lie in the moon-dark grass above the beach, watching and watched by the stars, sated and unashamed and by turns giggling and desperate.  
  
+  
  
    “Tell me about your loves,” the star’s daughter asks. “Is this what it’s always like?”  
    “It’s been different for me every time,” Lucy says, considering.  “I had political courtships and spring crushes and long, slow friendships, and all were wonderful in their own ways.  My sister and I had a friend, a naiad we both loved very much, and I still don’t quite understand it completely, but I learned so much from Theta, and Susan and I could talk about it and ever since I’ve always felt that trust is so important.  I love more than anything being able to trust someone with every part of me, body and mind.”  
    “Yes,” the other girl says, and Lucy kisses her thoroughly, reveling in the feel of how well-matched they are to each other.  But she has a point to this conversation.  
    "I may not ever return," Lucy tells her finally, pulling away, fists clenched in desire and fear. Ramandu's daughter sucks in a breath but says nothing.  
    "If I do...you will likely be long since dead.  It is so with everyone I love in Narnia."  She could have grown to love her island Duke, she thinks, but they left before she ever knew.  The loss of the possibility is enough; she worries that she loves Narnia more when she cannot have it, and she already feels the open sore of of losing this girl who she does know she loves.  She will make any sacrifice for Narnia — she has — but she is not in Narnia now, and she is not its queen any longer, and this feels like nothing so much as torture without gain.  
    "It is not for me to decide. It never is."  
    "Why do you love, Lucy, if you know you will always leave?"  
    Lucy smiles at her, quiet and fierce and suddenly strong again. "How could I not?"  
    "I think you are the bravest person I will ever know," Ramandu's daughter tells her, and Lucy laughs harshly. It does not suit her, but the star's daughter supposes that even Lucy must have something ugly in her.  
    "I am not brave."  
    "They did call you the Valiant, did they not? And all of your companions seem to hold your courage in high esteem, if Caspian's stories about you are to be believed."  
    "They called me Valiant because in a little girl’s exploits on a field of battle they saw something they did not know and could not explain.  My own comfort with the indecencies of war did not  sit well with many who joined our court, and painting me as something rare and special made for them a more comforting story than the truth that I forced them to accept, that I would fight to the last like any other knight against any threat to my people. Most of my Narnians have no constraints on who hunts and who defends the pups, and I accepted the title from them, and I love them for it.  But don’t believe all the tales, please.  We all too often try to tell someone else’s story.”  
  
+  
  
    Lucy helps with the baking, then walks by herself to find Caspian, to whom she also needs to make a point.  He sits on an outcrop of rocks, watching the sailors drill.  
    “What are you thinking about?” She asks quietly, propping her chin on his shoulder.  His mind is not on the strike and block of swords, she knows.  
    “Your Albatross,” he replies.  
    “It was Aslan, you know –” the clanking of her jaw against his collarbone makes it difficult to speak, so she shifts to sit cross-legged next to him, tucked up against his side.  
    “It was Aslan, and he’s hardly mine.”  
    “He’s more yours than anyone else’s,” he says, and she does not deny it.  
    “In any case, I thought we could make it your standard, when we return to Narnia.  I know you always had the cordial on your flag in the old days, but what do you think?”  
    She tries to let her silence be her answer, but he turns to her with such wide, earnest eyes that she can see he does not understand.  
    “Caspian –” she squints past the sun shining from behind him like a lion’s mane, and it is too bright – “I do not think I will be returning to Narnia.”  He meets her eyes for a long unbearable moment.  
    “Will you walk with me?” He asks. “I miss you.”  She pats his hand and rises.  
    “Let’s go to the beach.”  
  
+  
  
    “You have become great friends with the lady,” Caspian says as Lucy bends down for a half-buried shell.  
    “Yes.” The shell comes up jagged and ugly, and she skips forward a step to throw it away.  
    “She is very lovely,” he tries again, and Lucy takes pity on him, because he is trying to be honest with her and that is, after all, what she likes best about him.  He understands much of her, and what he doesn’t, he admits.  
    “You should court her,” she says, careful to catch his gaze. He touches her wrist, rough hands catching on her sea-smoothed skin.  She steps away, moving forward again, fingers trailing behind in a summons he hurries to meet.  
    “Lucy, you know you — “ She cuts him off with a bright smile; it is not entirely fake.  
    “You should court her.”  A sharp pain blossoms against her foot, and she looks down to see the shell she cast away, a smear of her blood bright against its dusty white grooves.  
    “After I’m gone,” she amends.  
  
+  
  
    “When you are queen,” Lucy starts, nodding towards Caspian, who watches them from his seat at the table.  Ramandu’s daughter laughs.  
    “I don’t think so,” she says.  
    “Whyever not?  He is a good man, and he is enchanted by you, and I think you would love Narnia.”  
    “I am not you,” the star’s daughter replies.  Lucy snorts.  “And he is not you, either,” she continues, touching Lucy’s face as lightly as the breeze.  Lucy pulls away slightly even as she reaches up to twine her fingers through the other girl’s.  
    “I will not always be here.  Caspian...Caspian understands that,” she says, wrinkling her nose as if it is a sneeze she feels threatening rather than a tear. _You must understand that, too_.  
  
+  
  
    “We’ll have to work something out so that you’re not alone on the ship,” Lucy murmurs later as the two girls sit, curled close together in the grass, watching the waves.  Ramandu’s daughter looks at her curiously.  
    “I mean, so you’re not the only woman on board,” Lucy amends.  
    “These things will matter in Narnia?  Haven’t you been the only lady?”  
    “Well, yes,” Lucy laughs.  “That didn’t matter much, though.  I look like a little girl, and this far East I’m no one of any importance.  But it won’t do for you to get back to Narnia with nobody to vouch for you. You might ask Caspian how important it is to the Telmarine Narnians; I know the Old Narnians won’t give two figs, but I suspect the humans still care all too much about modes of political modesty.  Perhaps you can pick someone up at the Lone Islands.”  
    “Who?” The star’s daughter asks. “I don’t really know how to judge people.”  There is no point to wishing and crying; she will take everything Lucy will give her in the time they have.  
    “The new Duke of those islands has several lovely daughters, politically-minded and hard workers.  I would be surprised if one or more of them didn’t leap at the opportunity to serve you in Narnia.”  
    “I’ll ask them, then,” she smiles.  
    “But,” Lucy says in a sudden burst, sitting up quickly before settling back, “you mustn’t forget to maintain an open household.  It’s alright for your personal ladies to be human, but your valets, your court, and diplomats and so forth - don’t forget all of Narnia’s people.”  
    “I promise,” the other girl says seriously.  “I will do my best by your people, Lucy.”  
    “Good,” Lucy replies, and kisses her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, a blessing and a simple comfort.  
  
+  
  
    Lucy finds her again later, after the ship has been prepared, the sailors settling in to a last meal at Aslan’s table.  After certain promises have been made between Caspian and the star’s daughter.  
    Lucy leans against a pillar and watches the lady watch the king, and when she settles to the ground and presses a kiss into the lady’s hair, the other girl turns to her immediately with a brave smile prepared and an incorrigible hurt in her eyes.  
    “Congratulations,” Lucy says, meeting Caspian’s eyes across the table.  
    “I think I should feel happier than I do,” the star’s daughter tells her, no small amount of guilt in the way she picks at her dress and holds herself slightly away from Lucy.  It has already begun, then, the loss, and Lucy thinks selfishly that she might have let them both pine for her alone.  She could so easily have made them as miserable as she knows she will be, and part of her wishes she had. Now she will be the one alone at night under stars that do not watch her in return, and if they miss her, they will hold each other and share memories and find comfort even in their sorrow.  
    She has never felt so cowardly as now, leaning forward for a kiss, linking her arm through the other girl’s and quietly, intimately making herself that much more unforgettable.  She glances at Caspian again and sees something in his eyes that encompasses both women before him, and she too draws back gently.  
    “I will be happy remembering you,” she says, brave again, “and I hope you will be happy when you remember me.”  
    “We will be,” the star’s daughter says, blinking in surprise at her new ownership of part of Caspian’s heart, and Lucy’s heart breaks again but she is determined to cause no pain.  
    “I do wish I could stay forever,” she says.  
    “But you have to go.”  
    “Caspian has to finish his quest, and it’s Reepicheep’s dearest dream, and -”  
    “And you might see Aslan.”  
    “Yes.”  
  
+  
  
    Lucy hugs the other girl good-bye, and they hold onto each other for many long minutes, waves rolling around their feet and their golden hair mixing and dancing in the wind.  They part with sad smiles and dry eyes, and Lucy leans back in to whisper something brief in the other’s ear before climbing aboard the waiting ship and sailing on.  She does not return.  
    When Caspian sails back, he asks for the name of the star’s daughter. She kisses him, open-mouthed and harsh with hope, and claims the name Lucy offered.  


* * *

  
“La Figlia Che Piange,” by T.S. Eliot  
  
 _O quam te memorem virgo_  
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—      
Lean on a garden urn—      
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—      
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—      
Fling them to the ground and turn          
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:      
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.      
   
So I would have had him leave,      
So I would have had her stand and grieve,      
So he would have left             
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,      
As the mind deserts the body it has used.      
I should find      
Some way incomparably light and deft,      
Some way we both should understand,             
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.      
   
She turned away, but with the autumn weather      
Compelled my imagination many days,      
Many days and many hours:      
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.  
And I wonder how they should have been together!      
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.      
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze      
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.  



End file.
